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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9648044" data-attributes="member: 7026594">There was also the whole Birthright campaign setting which was designed to center on rulership and domain play even from low levels, but was never popular at all.  I loved the aesthetics and the details it gave of the campaign world, but it seems like the audience was never there for this style of campaign.Indeed. From my experience, individual character roleplaying and campaign wargaming are two separate hobbies, and the former has a lot more fans than the latter.  One of my groups, the guys I started playing with around 2002, are both, but even that group doesn't combine the two the way Arneson originally intended, or Johnson advocates.TSR kept the high level domain play in the AD&D (1E and 2E) rules, and in BECMI starting in the Companion set.  (It's barely present at all in 1981 B/X; in the Expert set only the Cleric (edit: and Thief) has details on followers attracted at high level, and castle building is a single page).They did publish a (rare) one or two modules for this style of play- primarily CM1 Test of the Warlords, to my recollection.  But it always seemed vestigial.  Even Gary's players didn't seem to go in much for it.  We hear about Rob Kuntz' Robilar having a castle and two(?) green dragon mount(s?) and an army of orcs, but nothing about Gary's players doing faction play against one another and ruling competing territories.Yeah, there was some combination of lack of player interest and managerial incompetence on the miniatures side.From what I remember in When We Were Wizards (and maybe a bit from Game Wizards and Slaying the Dragon; memories are blurring), one of their big expensive executive hires who turned out to be a huge financial liability (including a contract buyout and probably extra for signing an NDA) was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Seifried" target="_blank">Duke Seyfried</a>, who they brought on specifically as a miniatures expert, to expand their miniatures and toy production.  He lasted only a little over a year before being a part of a big wave of restructuring layoffs in 1983.Yeah, in my years of fantasy wargaming I saw several attempts by various folks to run ongoing wargame campaigns with tracked losses and gains, continuity and a map of controlled territories.  And in my experience while there was often enough of a pool of players to START such a campaign, they often fizzled out due to the reinforcing feedback loops of winning and losing.Folks who win a couple of battles have more troops surviving, and acquire more territory to be able to support and raise larger armies.  Folks who lose a couple of battles rapidly have their forces and territories dwindle, and so they start to get into a death spiral.  And so forth.  So you might plan a campaign to go several months or a year, but it winds up sputtering out after a few weeks or a month or two.</blockquote>

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